Spring Rolls for Venzas and Vietnam

 

Ah the Spring roll… the egg roll’s healthier Vietnamese cousin, also known as “Summer rolls” when unfried.  We can’t resist these as an appetizer, but sometimes they can be pretty bland.  Luckily there’s always peanut sauce to the rescue!  We watched an ACTUAL cooking show on the Food Network (yes, they still have those… mostly in the mornings) and we thought that this recipe looked super simple!

Part of the fun of making a recipe like this (and generally the fun of making this blog) is that we get to go find scary specialty ingredients.  For this recipe, we went to Central Market to get:

Spring Roll Skin.  That doesn’t sound unappetizing at all.  There are a million of these guys in one container (which is good, cause we’ll be making them again).

These are essentially “rice paper,” and I have no idea how they’re made or why they have this handsome pattern all across them.

We also got vermicelli noodles.  These are easy enough to find in the grocery store.  You just soak them in hot water for 10 minutes and then drain.  Super easy.

Now, we decided to make shrimp spring rolls.  Luckily this recipe effectively layers flavor into every step, because we were not in the mood for boring, bland shrimp!  We don’t really have any pictures of this, but we poached the shrimp in water, wine, lime juice, and bay.   We also tossed in some leftover lemongrass. 

THEN we cooked the vermicelli noodles in the shrimp broth.

THEN we used that broth to soak the rice paper.  So every cooked ingredient in the spring roll has had a chance to absorb good shrimp flavor. 

The other key to great tasting spring rolls is fresh produce and herbs.

We used cucumber, shredded carrot, jalapeno, bell pepper, cilantro, and mint.  Onto the assembly!

Apologies for the blurry photo, but this part is important.  The rice paper doesn’t need much soaking. Hold it like a steering wheel, with the bottom part in the broth, and spin it until its just moistened. 

 

Just two little shrimp go into each roll.  Then we added crispy veggies that had been soaked in rice wine vinegar and soy sauce.

 

Then some mint, cilantro, and the vermicelli.

And then you have the carefully wrap it up like a little burrito.  The paper is pretty sticky, so once you start rolling it just sticks to itself.  After you do a couple of these, you get the hang of it!

The peanut sauce was easy enough to make…  Yup.  Pretty Darn easy.   

 

What, you were expecting more?  Sheesh.

 

Now you can impress all your friends with this easy appetizer that looks super complicated!  Ok, it was a little complicated, but it was fun and quite tasty!

Brûléed Bourbon-Maple Pumpkin Pie

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  We were recently listening to a piece on NPR about “what’s trending in food magazines” (way to go NPR for reaching your target audience!).  According to The Bitten Word, brûléed pumpkin pies is totally in this year.  We like to stay on top of trendy things, so we decided to take the bait and join the party.  Plus, we’ve been dying for an excuse to buy a kitchen blowtorch.  Can you blame us?

We decided to go with Bon Appétit’s Brûléed Bourbon-Maple Pumpkin Pie (our other choices would have been Martha Stewart Living or Saveur magazine, but we wanted to support the publication we actually subscribe to).

This recipe calls for a chocolate crust.  I mean, c’mon.  How can you turn that down?  Alas, Pilsbury does not make a chocolate dough, we had to make it ourselves.  We bought a fancy rare red Dutch processed cocoa powder from the store. 

Cocoa powder, sugar, salt, flour, butter, and shortening are blended in a food processer and then mixed with an egg to form a dough.

The dough was the hardest part of this recipe.  It turned out just fine, but it’s complicated to get it to stick together. 

But apparently I did a good enough job because I got it to look like this.  Pretty, eh? 

The crust is pre-baked for about 20 minutes.  I don’t have any pie weights, so I used dried beans.  The beans help keep the crust in place so that it holds it shape.  Can you reuse the beans after they’ve been baked like this?  Find out here. 

Now for the filling.  It’s pretty standard stuff:  canned pumpkin puree, sour cream, eggs, cinnamon,  ginger, nutmeg, allspice.

Plus some nonstandard stuff:  bourbon, maple syrup, vanilla bean (these suckers are pricey!).

 

The maple syrup and vanilla bean are heated up on the stove until bubbly.  Then heavy cream is slowly added. I was expected it to get all hot and bothered when I added the cold cream, but not much happened.  Maybe I didn’t do it right.  Check out those vanilla specs though!

 

The maple syrup mixture is added to the pumpkin mixture and then poured into the crust.  I made a little mini pie on the side in order to test it out (sneaky, huh?  I mean, I couldn’t serve my guests a sub-standard pie without tasting it first, now could I?).

After it cooled down, it got a big ol’ crack in it.  Drats!  Well never mind that, because now we’re going to cover it in sugar and torch it! 

Fun with fire.  This was actually more painstaking than we thought it would be.  Takes a while to get the sugar to melt and turn brown.

Well, it could be prettier, but it was still tasty.  It is best to let the sugar crust cool down a bit before you try to slice it.  A great twist on a classic pumpkin pie!  It was even better the next day when we ate it cold out of the fridge, though the brulee crust apparently gets absorbed into the pie after a while. 

So you can torch it up again!